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UWM Psychology Department
Our work is focused on helping individuals who experience depression. Depression is a very serious public health concern: In any given year, 1 in 10 people will experience clinical depression and approximately 20 million people in the United States alone will experience depression. Economic costs of depression are staggering but the ultimate cost - suicide - can not be measured.
As depression is caused by many things, and in turn causes many things, our work is very broad. Thus, we are interested in working with many of the problems associated with depression, including drug and alcohol problems, self-mutilation, and suicide. Ultimately, our goal is to improve the lives of individuals who experience depression so they can lead meaningful, productive lives filled with friendship, intimacy, accomplishment...whatever one wants out of life.
Our primary mission is to improve psychotherapy for depression. Because many individuals do not want anti-depressant medications, experience side effects from anti-depressant medications, and relapse when medications are discontinued, we believe there is a great need to develop more effective psychotherapeutic approaches.
We conduct:
- Basic research to better understand depression.
- Clinical research to improve psychotherapy for depression, specifically targeting underserved populations.
- Research to understand and reduce the stigma associated with depression.
- Psychotherapy process research to understand exactly what a psychotherapist should do with his or her clients to maximize the chances that psychotherapy will lead to lasting and meaningful changes.
Our goal is to improve psychotherapy for depression. We are researchers and clinicians - the research informs what we do clinically and the clinical work informs the research.
In our lab we encourage developing an understanding of behaviorism as a way to understand and research psychotherapy. The basic ideas are:
- Behavior is best understood in terms of the context in which it occurs or has occurred in the past. We look into people's lives and the world they live in, not into their brains, to understand why they feel and act the way they do.
- Many-to-most behaviors of interest to psychotherapists can be understood in terms of the natural reinforcement that has shaped and currently maintains the behavior.
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Private experiences, such as feeling, thinking, wanting, loving, and so forth, are important to understand and use in psychotherapy.
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The relationship that a therapist forms with the client is extremely important. Good, intense client-therapist relationships are incredibly powerful and can lead to powerful changes.
- We do not consider a psychological problem to be solved until the person’s behavior has improved. We aim to help people enjoy active and meaningful lives that they feel are worth living. This means that treatment may not be about reducing depression (although it may be) but it may also be about finding one’s values and how to live life in the service of those values.
